ENTREE: The best thing I ever ate

Cupcakes store owners Lori Joyce and Heather White enjoy their favourite foods – a honey-glazed doughnut from Lee’s on Granville Island for Joyce, and a latte with a shot of vanilla and a classic Belgian waffle with maple syrup for White.Stuart Davis
/ PNG

Put that question to foodies and you’d think there would be tortured hand-wringing and rumination (of the mental sort).

We decided to pose the question to local foodies with one proviso: the food had to have been eaten in the Vancouver area.

Surprisingly, most responded as though they’d been waiting forever to be asked. Some became babbling brooks and I had to stop the flow: One! Just one food! In some cases, I relented and allowed them seconds and thirds because they were so passionate.

It surprised me because when I turned the mike on myself, I hemmed and hawed way too long, and all I could think of was the best thing I ever ate in the last week. (A carbonara pizza from Campagnolo with a runny egg on top to smoosh around or dip with the pizza wedges. Oh my! So good.)

I thought people’s answers would sum up their personalities, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

Take Lori Joyce and Heather White, of the Cupcakes store franchise and more recently of The Cupcake Girls reality show on TV. They have matching high-octane personalities with high decibel levels and a bring-it-on attitude.

But in food, they are complete opposites. White is obsessively health-conscious. When asked if she eats her own cupcakes, she’s direct. “I have to, otherwise I’d never know what we’re selling. I’ll have a mini. I could never do full cupcakes,” she says. Her all-time favourite treat is almost not a food: A latte at Cafe Medina with a shot of vanilla. A latte? That’s it?

She defends her choice: “How they do the crema and foam is like nothing else. I’ll have it every Saturday morning after a hardcore workout and run. I love to sit there at the bar.... It’s the creaminess and how they steam the milk.”

Okay, she admits, there’s something else.

“When I’m being really bad, I’ll have the waffle there. It’s one single little Belgian waffle. I have it with maple syrup. It’s so simple and so classic.”

Joyce, on the other hand, likes what she likes and if it’s got too many calories — well, isn’t that what the Grouse Grind is for?

“The honey-glazed doughnuts at Lee’s on Granville Island are the best I’ve ever had,” she says. “I kept them in business while I was pregnant. It was my whole excuse to get my groceries at Granville Island. It’s the most fresh, sugariest, delicious, totally dangerous doughnut I’ve ever had,” she says.

“I work out so I can eat,” she adds.

“I’d rather be a Size 8 or 10 than be starving as a Size 4. I don’t make it out of a bakery without eating the entire baguette.”

See what I mean? How different can two peas-in-a-pod women be when it comes to the best things they’ve eaten?

Meanwhile, Cullin David, the chef at Calabash Caribbean restaurant, says the best thing he’s eaten is the pineapple chicken at Sawasdee Thai restaurant.

“Oh, yeah! It’s the flavour. I love the restaurant but the pineapple chicken reminds me of childhood. It’s really similar to Caribbean food. It’s sweet and salty and spicy all together in one dish. It’s got pineapples, bell peppers, and chicken that’s battered and fried, and it’s all tossed with the sauce.

“When I go out, I usually steer away from finer dining and the hoity-toity stuff. I like homestyle cooking.”

And Thierry Busset, the pastry chef at Cin Cin, says his tastes have expanded since coming to Vancouver.

His favourite dish is the squab at Sun Sui Wah Chinese restaurant and, in a roundabout way, it reminds him of France.

“I’ve become a bit Asian. It’s the way they cook the squab, like in Europe. It’s braised for a long time. It’s very tender and tasty. It’s simple on the plate but tasty. For a French man, it’s weird, yeah, but I do like Asian food more and more since moving to Vancouver. I didn’t even eat sushi before.”

Some people’s “best things ever eaten” had an emotional base, with Proustian connections to childhood or special memories. Some were more intellectual and highlighted the culinary artistry and esthetics of a dish.

For me, the best dish would have been all of the above. Maybe that’s why I like French bistro food so much. It’s got a homeyness, artistry and finesse wrought from the French love of food, memories of my food-driven trips to France, and smack-your-lips deliciousness.

Add a room that’s full of life and character and I’m in heaven.

And it’s brilliant. I don’t need to schlep to France for it.

Many of the dishes at La Regalade, Pied a Terre and La Brasserie take me there.

Mark Brand (co-owner of Boneta, The Diamond and Sea Monstr Sushi) can’t separate the best thing he’s ever eaten from the people associated with them.

“I love the tamarind deep-fried Dungeness crab at Phnom Penh and I absolutely love the lady who owns it. It’s off-menu but I phone in the day before. She started making it for me three years ago. It’s a whole crab and it’s insane. It marks occasions for me. I have it three, four times a year. The dish encapsulates what they do at Phnom Penh. I go at it with my hands.”

Thomas Haas (Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates and Patisserie) is a details guy, which is why he’s such a fantastic pastry chef. The best thing he ever ate in Vancouver is a detail that makes a dish come alive. It’s the pink peppercorn sauce served with grilled beef tenderloin at Le Crocodile.

“It’s the perfect balance of pepperiness and acidity and richness. They use a veal stock and cream in the right amounts and they must add lemon juice at the end. They know how much I love it and give me a half-litre jar of the sauce when I order it. I freeze it and use it when I cook dinner.

“At the end of the day,” he adds, “good food is always about the simplicity. The dishes I remember the next day or next week are simple, but perfect. We over-think so often, I think. When the choice of ingredients is perfect, then it comes down to simple pleasures, well executed.”

He still praises the beauty of a brioche he ate at age 20 at Lenotre pastry school in Paris. “It was so light, when you pulled it apart, it was stringy but so light you could see the air encased in there. And buttery. I’ll never forget it. Even now, when I pull my brioches apart, I see if it’s like that. I’ve come close by using a planetary mixer where the hook turns in opposite directions, like the planets around the sun.”

Annabel Hawksworth (of Hawksworth Communications, which represents many fine restaurants) loves the gnocchi she often eats at Uva.

“It’s a different style, not the traditional small little potato gnocchi. It looks more like a hockey puck and has a similar texture to polenta. It’s served with sage, butter and cheese and a red wine sausage.”

David Chung (owner of Jade Seafood Restaurant in Richmond) went to try his favourite dish one more time to make sure it was indeed as good as he remembered.

The dish from Deer Garden Signatures in Richmond, steamed halibut belly with chopped preserved olives (“$9.75 and No. 812 on the menu”) comes with rice and soup.

“With that special preserved olive taste, the dish just tastes great and since it’s steamed, it’s healthy, too. It’s a dinner dish and only served after 5 p.m. I had to wait for a seat even at 5:30 and kind of rushed out in 45 minutes. There were people waiting for our table.”

Dale MacKay (Lumiere restaurant chef) has a built-in radar for a great dish. “For me, a great dish makes me feel special. It has soul.”

And for the time being, it’s the poached veal with tuna sauce at Cioppino’s Mediterranean Grill.

“It’s classic old-school Italian. I don’t know exactly how he does it but it’s the finesse. You wouldn’t expect veal and tuna to match. I’ve had it before elsewhere but I’ve never enjoyed it. It takes skill.

“It’s what I try to do at Lumiere — cook with finesse. Ten chefs can put a dish together but only one can make it sing. It’s that finesse factor.”

Vikram Vij rejoices over spot prawns he had at Maenam.

“It was steamed with a little broth with Thai curry. It was the balance of acidity, the trueness of the ingredients and the ambience.”

Ambience, he says, can make or break a dish.“You could have the same dish somewhere, not happy or fighting with your spouse and you’ll not enjoy it. But if you’re having fun, oh my God!”

He says he used his hands to eat the prawns and “sucked the brains out.” Come again?

“You have to acquire a taste,” Vij says. “Others wouldn’t eat it. I just sucked it and chewed on the shell because it was so delicious.”

Partly, it’s a thank you to the prawn. “You cannot just say I’m only going to eat the meat. I would be really sad if someone killed me and just ate my ribs. I also have a delicious heart, liver, brains.”

The best thing she ever ate? The beef sausage on a bun at Ethical Kitchen in North Vancouver.

“This will be my coming out as I’ve never been a vegan or vegetarian. I tend to be vegetarian but if I come across ethically raised meat, I don’t deprive myself.

“I came from working in fine dining so I know how to cook with meat,” she says.

Sausage on a bun is enhanced, she adds, by homemade condiments and the house-made sausage.

Potter confesses that when she worked at Feenie’s (where db Bistro Moderne now sits), after service, the hungry staff would make “freestyle poutine” with “whatever the stations could donate.”

Shelley McArthur (publicist, Top Table Restaurants) eats out for herself and for work. When she cooks at home, she loves to shop at JN&Z Deli, a family affair on Commercial Drive. “I love the smoked beef tenderloin. I’ve been getting it there for a couple of years. The smoke is subtle and it’s so tender. It’s dense, cut sliced really thin. I serve is as part of a charcuterie plate.”

“The best food is casual. I love the ramen at Kintaro Ramen because for me, fine dining is more intellectual. It’s always interesting to see the presentation and technique behind it but it’s never as good as a bowl of ramen.

“When I was a child, Mom was always making soup, mostly chicken noodle or rice, but always soup with bread. It was comforting. I’m a recent ramen fan.

“In Montreal [where he grew up], there isn’t a big Japanese influence. To discover Kintaro and Guu and Gyoza King when I first moved here was a discovery. There were flavours I’d never tasted.

“Kintaro ramen really gets to me, especially when it’s raining here in Vancouver. The noodle is perfect and chewy.”

“It’s not the typical tan tan noodle. I don’t know what they do to it; it’s a secret recipe. It’s the most undefeatably awesome tan tan noodles in the world. I always order it.

“I look for really comforting, warming food with lots of fat or butter. I like the tan tan noodles because everything’s right. It’s quite intense. It’s got pork, dried shrimp and some kind of pickle and it’s definitely fattening. And the ramen noodles are perfectly cooked to al dente.”

ENTREE: The best thing I ever ate

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